sunflash-Distributed to mailing list sun/NC/north-carolina sunflash-Send requests, problems to owner-sunflash@suntri.east.sun.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Florida SunFlash SunSoft Announces Technology Partnership with NeXT SunFLASH Vol 59 #30 November 1993 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 59.30 SunSoft Announces Technology Partnership with NeXT SunSoft made the following announcement today, November 23, 1994, regarding their new agreements with NeXt Computers Inc. SMCC supports these agreements to create an open, object-oriented applications environment standard. This announcement further reinforces Sun's commitment towards the development of standards, open interfaces at multiple levels, and open systems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUNSOFT TO INTEGRATE NEXT OBJECT TECHNOLOGY INTO ENTERPRISE OPERATING ENVIRONMENT SunSoft and NeXT Partner to Drive Volume Object Standard SAN FRANCISCO, November 23, 1993 - SunSoft Inc., today announced it will license key components from NeXT Computer Inc. to speed time-to-market for SunSoft's Solaris object environment. The integration of the NeXTSTEP object application environment with Solaris yields unparalleled power for enterprise computing. SunSoft also unveiled a series of agreements with NeXT to further promote open specifications and the standardization of object technology. Solaris is the highest volume UNIX enterprise solution in the industry today with an installed base of more than 1.4 million. With the inclusion of NeXT's application environment into Solaris, SunSoft intends to be the industry's first to deliver a fully object-based, enterprise level software solution. Solaris, with this new integrated object application layer, will give SunSoft's rightsizing customers a best-of-breed solution to build mission critical applications faster and that are more reliable - while at the same time, remain compatible with existing Solaris applications. "We are excited to see the standardization of an open object specification," said Craig Heimark, chief information officer of Swiss Bank Corporation. "Swiss Bank has made a major investment in objects, UNIX and open systems, and we believe the teaming of SunSoft, and the volume of Solaris, with NeXT, and their leading object technology, will result in the most widely accepted and technically superior object standard in the industry." The NEXTSTEP application environment will be integrated with Solaris' Distributed Object Environment as part of the company's Project DOE effort. Customers will gain the advantage of the industry's best object application development environment hosted on the leading implementation of the OMG (Object Management Group) CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and COSS (Common Object Services Specification) standards. Further, the DOE architecture exploits the major advances in Solaris, including multithreading, multiprocessing, security and sophisticated network administration capabilities. Client/server computing using open technologies, such as the UNIX operating system, has increasingly grown in acceptance over the past several years. This accelerating growth is strongly due to the rapid decline in hardware prices and increase in power, functionality and user friendliness. Many systems utilizing UNIX, long chastised for its difficult user interface, are now as easy to operate as a PC or Macintosh. However, all these advancements have made it increasingly difficult for application developers, who are struggling with the huge task of leveraging this new functionality in the software they must write. Object-oriented software development can greatly simplify the developers' task. Objects are interchangeable and reuseable software components that can be easily combined to create applications. Through Project DOE, SunSoft extends the object- oriented approach to a distributed computing environment, enabling applications to transparently leverage computer resources anywhere on the network. "Today's announcement will accelerate SunSoft's time to market with Project DOE to deliver a best-of-breed distributed software solution for enterprise level computing," said Ed Zander, president of SunSoft. "This agreement will allow SunSoft, the highest volume UNIX supplier, to respond to customer demands for faster and simpler ways to develop applications by providing the best technology and standardization through open specifications." OpenStep Accelerated Object Adoption To help accelerate the adoption of this emerging object technology and stimulate the market of independently developed components, SunSoft and NeXT announced that they will work together on the establishment of "OpenStep" as an industry standard for object development. OpenStep is an open application programming interface (API) derived from the operating system-independent subset of NEXTSTEP 3.2. The support of these two companies behind a single standard will result in a high volume market for objects written to the specification. NeXT will freely license the OpenStep specification and the OpenStep trademark to any implementation that passes a verification test suite. SunSoft and NeXT will work with the appropriate standards organizations to deliver a comprehensive set of application development standards based on the OpenStep specification that the entire industry can freely use. NeXT to License NFS, CORBA and IDL from SunSoft SunSoft also announced that as part of the strategic relationship, NeXT has licensed key distributed computing technology components for its NEXTSTEP environment. The agreement provides the right for NeXT to use SunSoft's Network File System (NFS), which has a current installed base of more than 4 million nodes, and the new SunSoft high performance OMG-compliant Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) technology and its Interface Definition Language (IDL) compiler, which is the most advanced technology for distributed object computing today. SunSoft to OEM NEXT Application Builder In addition to the application environment, SunSoft announced that it has acquired OEM rights to NeXT's Developer Environment. The technology provides developers with a complete visual object application construction toolbox allowing developers to create applications by selecting from a palette of existing objects and only create the new objects needed to complete the application logic, dramatically improving software developers' productivity and application quality. SunSoft, Inc. SunSoft, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif, is a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc., the exclusive computer supplier to World Cup USA 1994. The company has office in North America, Europe and Asia. SunSoft is a leading supplier of 32-bit system software solutions for SPARC and Intel 80386/486-based computers. The products are licensed by SunSoft and distributed through major computer manufacturers worldwide. # # # 1993 Sun Microsystems, Inc., SunSoft and Solaris are trademarks or registered of Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX Systems Laboratories. 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